Resuscitation
by Cutterin
Summary: How do you learn to breathe again when you never learned how to begin with?


Disclaimer: I don't own it, you just like to make me say it don't ya? There's a word for people like you. I can't write it in the general section, but you get the general idea.  
She is agonizingly aware of her breathing.  
  
It comes out in sweeping torrents. It mists up the night air and sends little smoke signals out to hidden allies. It warms the under of her nose and keeps the skin above the mouth from cracking. It is painful and laborious and, good God it is slow. The sadistic bit; it is only even happening because she is wilfully urging herself to make it.  
  
She shouldn't even be here.  
  
She knows it's a trick. A fake paper trail, a fabricated sighting, another little tear in the almost obliterated façade that clings to special agent Sydney Bristow like bubble wrap.  
  
She is, though. She is standing in a dark square, in a dark town, in the middle of a dark European country, wondering why it can't be dark enough to drown out the solid smog that accompanies the filling of that double cavity in her chest.  
  
Straining her neck and using standard issue binoculars, she can see the midnight news through an unlit bedroom window. Taxes are rising, people are dying, and a plane crashed in Denmark, the last complete with footage showing a rain of fiery jet bits and gawping Europeans staring in reverent awe at the sky.  
  
Before she can let her mind wander back to the possibility of a plane home- tonight, and the idea that she has become completely devoid of human compassion, a hiss of static and the smooth pause of radio space smacks her back into reality.  
  
It is the most fleeting of pauses, the slightest hiss, but she catches it- she catches it as well as she sees the silhouette stride purposefully across the cement surround of the mandatory fountain.  
  
The full force, the possibility, that this might be more than a trick hits her. Hard. Not unlike a steel-tipped jack-knife.  
  
There is the briefest of seconds where she considers ending it there and then, she has a magnum in her purse, it would be so easy, so refreshing, but the obligatory after thoughts tell her the guilt might toy with her concentration, and she needs that of course, to carry out the vital gas exchange.  
  
For an even briefer second, she entertains the thought that this whole breathing thing may be becoming an infatuation.  
  
Then she is on him, can smell the cheap aftershave on his skin and feel the brashness of the thick, padded coat he is still half wearing and- God, she loves the chase, lives for the catch, if she was honest, the only two reasons she's still in the game and.breathe Sydney, the trick is to keep breathing.  
  
Her face barely registers the internal battle, choosing to apply a little outward pressure instead. She twists his arm a little, unintentionally, but not, she'll admit, unsatisfactorily, throws him onto the brickwork- that is, she assents, quite pretty- and straddles his back. She can hear him mumbling curses in Russian, some too vernacular for her to place, but she gets the rather unthreatening gist.  
  
"You can talk or you can see where not talking gets you."  
  
Her Russian is flawless, a fact that comes complete with a significant attack of nausea at the speaking. She waits, gets no reply, and then twists the arm again, a little more than a little this time. Bile accumulates in the apex of her throat at the acute crack and accompanying scrape of skin on blood on bone, but it's the screaming that throws her respiration off track.  
  
Old Sydney doll would not have done that, she thinks, but there is a reason why that one has an old before her name, the newer, improved Desperation Sydney model, will not, cannot, lose another Ken. No, not Ken, Action Man. Action Vaughn.  
  
She contemplates the thought that she may now be a delirious breathing addict with a doll fixation.  
  
"I.I don't know.I can't."  
  
Men shouldn't cry, wouldn't if they knew how unsettling it felt to hear. To be the cause of. The left arm hits the stone with a muffled thump and she lifts her foot from the right to start on it- takes a deep, forced breath, knowing that losing this fight will be a hell of a lot harder than winning it, but if it takes her a step closer.- and loses her balance majestically. It is enough for the guy to throw her off his back and into a conveniently placed pillar, air sacs flailing like a drowning man.  
  
He is up and facing her in an instant, the broken limb dangling perilously from the elbow joint, the unbroken limb toting a nice, large, piece of artillery.  
  
"Now, you can do as I say. or you can make up for some of my damage."  
  
She can see the pain on his lips, from the froth that spills forth when he snarls and spits the words out. Thinking that she could take five of him- ten of him, she raises her arms above her head and drops to her knees when instructed to.  
  
The black coat comes closer, the pungent smell with it, left side turned slightly away, expecting another barrage. She does move, slightly, rapidly, for no other reason than to fulfil his expectations.  
  
The gun butt collides with her skull at the same time as his knee punctures her stomach, and she does struggle with the inhalation, she does grapple with the expiration, but she smiles, a little, too. The blood pools into her collar and for the first time in a long time, she thinks this might be her ticket back to life again.  
  
She thinks this might just be divine, horrific-smelling and long overdue resuscitation. 


End file.
